“The world has left the earth behind”

In his luminous fictional trilogy, Into Their Labours, John Berger describes in the first two volumes, Pig Earth and Once in Europa, the world of a small peasant village in the French Alps, a village that until very recently must have been fairly remote from big cities, as it begins to come apart with increasing contact with the wider economy and market mentality of the outside world, and, in the final volume, Lilac and Flag, the scattering of its children to the big cities.

In the village and the country around it we see, as we move through the first two volumes, an older peasant mentality, the mentality of a culture of survival and intergenerational continuity with (as Berger says in his Introduction) a “profound suspicion of money,” collide with a mentality that is still fairly novel to most of the villagers, a mentality that some would call capitalist, though it is wider than that and which, for now, we can call the market mentality as long as we remember that it is not confined to societies in which economic transactions are governed largely by competitive markets.

On three occasions in the trilogy someone refuses to sell something. Marcel, of Pig Earth, refuses to sell his old cider press. In Once in Europa Odile's father refuses to sell his farm to the owners of the factory complex that now completely surrounds the farm and is poisoning the land and mutilating its own workers.